Dr. Andrew Quicksall, a professor in the Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering, recently spent four months traveling throughout two different continents focusing on arsenic research.
With the support of a $27,000 grant from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and with SMU funds, Quicksall took a group of mostly graduate students to 17 different refugee camps throughout Africa and Asia.
The professor and his students traveled from August through December to countries including Kenya, Liberia, Uganda and Bangladesh.
There they made measurements of water points at wells and collected water samples to bring back to analyze and find solutions to the dangerous water quality issues in these nations.
They found problems in all 17 refugee camps that serve water to more than 1 million people.
“We found lead in Bangladesh, and the people had no idea they were drinking it every day,” Quicksall said. He plans to take a group back in May to help fix the problem.
Quicksall has taught graduate level courses in environmental chemistry and aquatic chemistry.
He is currently teaching freshman design courses.
“He is very busy, but the most charismatic person ever,” Emily M. Vernon, distance education coordinator of the Lyle School of Engineering, said. “If you can get a hold of him, he will give you more information than you will ever need.”
Quicksall graduated from Texas Christian University with a bachelor’s in environmental sciences and then went on to Washington State University to get his master’s in geology.
From there, he went to Dartmouth where he received a Ph.D. in earth sciences.
“I am a science person,” Quicksall, who has taught at the SMU engineering school for two years, said.
Quicksall best describes this study as finding “places where toxic metals are in drinking water and finding ways to eliminate those problems. It is figuring out where it is, why it’s there and how to fix it.”
The group’s goal now is to develop a database that will help the UNHCR provide safer drinking water in the refugee camps.
The database will identify contaminants in the water and allow the UNHCR to track water quality in the camps over a period of time.
“In order to prevent the numerous types of cancer outbreaks associated with arsenic consumption, it is imperative that drinking water be monitored to ensure that arsenic levels meet the required standard,” Warren Thayer, a senior civil engineering major, said. “Especially in foreign countries where groundwater wells are still the main source of water.”
